My son visited town the other day. He has BPD and anger/anxiety-related issues. He’s always gotten very uncomfortable when people talk about sexual assault, grooming, or predatory behavior. The topics make him emotional, so he asks to change it whenever possible. His boss left a bag of candy in his locker the other day to applaud him for his work performance. He put it in his car, forgot about the bag and it was sitting in his passenger seat for a while.

There was a news report one or two days after about a kidnapper that had been apprehended and arrested. I started talking about the report and my son made a comment about how he finds it disturbing the amount of creepers that approach children in vans and bait them with candy. I made a joke that he should get rid of the candy bag in his car before people assume he’s a child predator and he argued that possession of candy alone is not sufficient reason to be concerned and that anyone who makes that correlation is stupid, but people who approach kids in vehicles randomly are definitely suspect.

I kept demanding that he get the bag out of his car and he ignored me, saying he was too lazy to do it at that moment. But that same evening when he went to his vehicle to put his wallet in the car, he pushed the bag on the floor.

The next morning, he told me about the bag being on the ground and told me it’s not a big deal as no one will notice. I pointed out that him doing that was really suspicious and his excuse was that he was planning to dump it along with the other garbage in his car when he cleans it out.

Regardless, I made sure he realized that I thought it was odd and I kept calling him out on it. This led to him getting confused and defensive where he began questioning if I was implying that he’s a predator. He wouldn’t stop obsessing about it and got teary-eyed and confided in me about a time he was assaulted in the past and said that was the reason he took my comments personally. He tried very hard to reassure me that he wasn’t a predator. This led to him asking me to elaborate on what I meant when I used the adjective “suspicious.” I explained suspicious was the wrong word to use and that it was a joke, to which he clarified that he’s perfectly okay with jokes, but that at the time, it really did feel like a subtle accusation.

Even still, wouldn’t you agree that his behavior was suspicious? I talked about it with a friend and she agreed with me, saying that he was gaslighting me. It doesn’t seem like a normal person would be THAT paranoid about something like this. I mentioned that his comment about strange vehicles and candy just seems a bit odd when he’s in possession of a candy bag in his car and his explanation was that the two are completely unrelated and his comment only applies to weirdos in general.